X.org DevRoom at FOSDEM2009

Time: Saturday, 7th and Sunday, 8th of February 2009.

Place: At FOSDEM 2009 in Brussels, Belgium.
X.org will this year have its fourth X.org DevRoom at FOSDEM. The goal of X.org ?DevRoom at FOSDEM is to have X developers meet, discuss and hack and X.org will have a very clear presence at one of the most highly regarded Free and Open Source community events. So FOSDEM is the perfect place to get exposed to both the X.org developer and the X.org (advanced) user community.

X.org at FOSDEM Schedule

Saturday, 7th of February 2009:

Sunday, 8th of February 2009:

10.00 - 17.00: X.org Devroom.

X.org DevRoom

A ?DevRoom is a project/topic specific room on FOSDEM, holding up to 100 people. It is public but doesn't tend to draw the crowds the main FOSDEM talks tend to get. In general, the FOSDEM public consists of developers and more advanced users and people interested in X.org and the topic in the talk scheduled then will attend such talks.

The ?DevRoom is free and open to everyone, there is no registration required. If the devroom is dangerously full, like during the 2006 Xgl or the 2008 Gallium talk, you will just be denied access :)

This year, we have room H.1309, which has a massive 150seat capacity, and the luxury of 3 breathing holes. It's the first ?DevRoom on the upper level in the main building, which was last years CentOS/Fedora ?DevRoom.

16.00: Jerome Glisse: Shader Compiler Optimisation Strategies.
The empty slots in this schedule will be filled up still. The fosdem website also has a page with our schedule.

DevRoom Talks

Matthias Hopf : RandR 1.3: New Features in a Nutshell.

RandR 1.3 presents - amongst other things - transformations, panning, and standardized properties. This talk will show how to use these features and how they should influence tools and applications.

Keith Packard: The Rebuilt Linux Desktop.

Graphics drivers under Linux have seen the most significant changes since X was first ported in the last year. The X server can now run as an unprivileged process; kernel panic messages can be displayed while graphics are active; graphics applications can use virtual memory to store GPU data.

In the kernel, these changes include the new Graphics Execution Manager (GEM) and kernel-based video mode setting (KMS). Beyond the kernel, the second version of the Direct Rendering Interface X extension (DRI2) unifies the X and OpenGL image storage space.

This talk will describe the kernel and user-space changes along with the other kernel changes necessary to support the new code. Finally, the audience will be encouraged to participate in a discussion about future plans in this area.

Stephane Marchesin: Nouveau Status Update.

Since last Fosdem, Nouveau has been making steady progress. This talk will detail some of the changes made since last year and present the newest features. Throughout this talk, I will also introduce a number of "did you know ?" slides about the project and Nvidia hardware's inner workings.

This talk reports on experiences gained with a set of experimental extensions for multimedia processing in the X Window System. They allow to transmit compressed images and audio through the X protocol, and provide playback synchronization capabilities within the X server. This for example to build network-transparent media players and bring multimedia to classical thin clients.

Eric Anholt: Intel's graphics projects for the coming year.

While significant progress has been made in fixing the Linux graphics architecture, there are still some sharp edges. This talk will cover Intel's plans for the coming year, including DRI2 vblank support, DRI2 page flipping, rebuilding Mesa's compiler infrastructure, pulling ideas from Gallium into core Mesa, and more.

Matthew Garrett: Aggressive power management in graphics hardware.

Computers spend a lot of time idle, and graphics cards spend a lot of time just displaying a static image. This talk presents various techniques for reducing the power consumption of graphics hardware without any significant impact on visual quality or performance.

Matthias Hopf: r600_demo: Programming the New GPU Generations from AMD

By allowing the release of r600_demo AMD has carried out a first step of their promise to release enough information for open source DRI driver development. As the initial, to be released documentation will be very register centric there is hardly enough information about how the chips are actually working. This talk will give an overview over how the r6xx and r7xx chip families are to be programmed, and in which pit falls one might stumble.

With the increasing importance of shaders, it has become necessary to use advanced optimization strategies for shader compilers. This talks presents the ongoing work on integrating a compiling and optimizing framework (LLVM) with a 3D framework (Gallium 3D). We will discuss the main difficulties behind this work, the inner workings and the current developments.

Jerome Glisse: Shader Compiler Optimisation Strategies.

Different GPUs have different architectures and thus require different shader compiler optimisations for more optimal performance. This talk explains some of the differences between both AMD, Nvidia and Intel GPUs and will present some compiler algorithms to optimise shaders accordingly.

DevRoom Speakers

There are still some talk slots open. If you're interested in giving a talk at our ?DevRoom, then contact us right away. FOSDEM provides a projector and networking. If you need anything further you should probably bring this along yourself, but feel free to ask anyway :)

Social Event

We might end up at the excellent and affordable restaurant mirabelle again. But it is too early days for that to be certain.

Further FOSDEM information

For more information about the FOSDEM event, there's always the FOSDEM website. It includes city maps, information about transportation and a list of hotels.

If you would like a complete overview of FOSDEM, then maybe last years site will be of interest.

Registration and further information

Feel free to just mail me, lverhaegen at suse dot de, or the xorg mailinglist, or poke us on irc in #xorg-europe on freenode.net.